ATI R580 Architecture Interview

In our recent "R580: ATI Radeon X1900 XTX and Crossfire" article we took a look at the architecture of this new ATI chip and the performance it brings with its interesting configuration. With R580 scaling up the number of pixel shader processors fairly drastically, and yet not similarly scaling either the number of texture inputs or ROP outputs, some may still have the impression that R580 is a fairly imbalanced part.

In an effort to dig further into ATI's thinking behind the design of R580 and gain a greater understanding of the decisions that have lead to this process we decided to put some questions to them. In reply we have answers from Eric Demers, from ATI's Desktop Graphics Engineering group, as well as a few comments from Richard Huddy, who brings in the perspective from their ISV relations group, which has a front line role to play with developers and who plays an important part in shaping future hardware.